New Year's Resolutions 2025

I feel the urge to Paul Graham this one – really break down New Year’s Resolutions, talk about why they work, why they don’t work, what constitutes a good New Year’s resolution, and the like. But then I stand the risk of becoming a little too meta. The goal of this post is not to write about New Year’s resolutions, but rather to make the resolutions themselves.

It seems best if I start, though, by talking about what constitutes a good New Year’s resolution, and what constitutes a good habit, more generally.

The parable of the rocks, pebbles, sand and water makes sense here, and is well known, but I will re-tell it here for self-containment and because I like my version better.

Let’s say that you’re at a beach, and you want to take home a souvenir. To store your souvenir, you have a single jar. How would you fill up your jar? Maybe you’d put in some smooth rocks, volcanic rocks, a seashell, some sand, etc. If you wanted to maximize the value of your jar, you’d probably want to fill it as much as you can, while taking a variety of different items. If you put the pebbles in first, then all the rocks and seashells would sit on top, leaving no room for them. Similarly, if you put sand, then when you put the pebbles in, there would be empty space between them. Conversely, if you put the big items in first – seashells, rocks – and then the smaller items, the small stuff would settle in between the big stuff, allowing you to maximize the variety and amount of things in your jar.

Now, let’s say that the jar is 2025, and the beach consists of the possibilities for the year. I can only realize so many of them – hangouts, achievements, new skills, goals – and it’s up to me to fit in the ones that I believe are most important. Some activities are easy and short but have a small impact – like spending 5 minutes on learning the piano. Other activities are big and valuable, like finishing a large work project, or achieving a fitness goal. But I ought to fit the big possibilities in first, because the only way they get done is if I plan around them, and fit in the smaller goals.

To add to the complexity, each activity that you could partake in has a different cadence. A couple of examples:

• Planning a hangout with friends may involve exchanging a couple of messages asynchronously, followed by the event itself
• Doing a work project is flexible, unless you have a deadline, in which case it makes sense to fit everything in prior to the deadline
• Tasks which involve coordination with others would necessitate intermediate meetings, so a series of deadlines
• Most solo tasks are genuinely flexible, but benefit from taking breaks. How long the breaks should be depends on your focus stamina.
• Weightlifting should happen at least twice a week per muscle group
• Cardio should be 3 hours per week, ideally at 45-60 minute intervals

If you’re setting your own schedule, it’s essential to be aware of the different things you’re trying to do and their respective cadences. If morale / sticking with something is an issue, scheduling becomes even more important. You want to do something for long enough each day that you see results quickly enough, but slowly enough that you don’t burn out and are able to build up a habit.

For me, my primary goals are:

• Continue to grow my skills as a developer – currently I’m working on systems design, but this might also include more ML at some point.
• Lose weight / build muscle / improve overall health
• Be more social (still in lockdown mode somewhat)
• Backpacking + hostels while I’m still young enough to do so
• Move to a new city

Minor goals include:

• Develop a stronger online presence (portfolio, blogs, etc.)
• Learn to swim
• More sports / games (goes hand in hand with social activities)
• Improve my fashion sense

Some nice-to-haves include:

• Learning a new language
• Learning piano / guitar / harmonium

I’d like to cultivate some traits as well:

• Being someone who is easy to help – diligence and organization are key here.
• High morale: this one is from the book I’m reading, about Napoleon. To paraphrase from the book: high morale is sufficient to overcome most problems. I will talk about this more, because I find this concept quite interesting.

In terms of fitting all of these into the year, while maximizing productivity, it’s essential that I both respect the cadences of each individual task, such as working out. My current trainer has me working out 4x a week, and 30 minutes of walking per day. Missing individual workouts is bad because it slows my rate of progress, which in turn makes it less likely that I show up for the next one, because I’m not consistently making progress.

The min-max on social activities for me seems to be between 2-10 per month, but I’d like to increase this number. Spacing them out is good because it serves as a counterbalance to isolation. Always having at least one thing to look forward to helps a lot. It’s hard to schedule things in advance, but it’s always good when I can.

Here’s a proposed schedule on some of the blog posts I’d like to write this year:

1. January 6 - how to plan a backpacking trip (for non-planners)
2. January 8 - lessons learned from a year of solo-ish dev as a new grad
3. January 13 - systems design series part 1 (will talk more about this later)
4. January 20 - systems design series part 2
5. January 27 - systems design series part 3 (the conclusion, hopefully)
6. Esprit de corps: notes on Andrew Robert’s Napoleon: A Life
7. Novadyne
8. Mechanistic interpretability notes: Bloomin Gardens, Hanabi, Chess, and other games

6-8 are more tentative, and so I don’t really care so much when they get done by, or if at all.

Jan 3, 2024: I anticipate adding more to this post in the coming days.